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Michele Mitchell is associate professor of history at New York University and former North American editor of Gender & History. In addition to histories of gender and sexuality, she specializes in U.S. history, African American history, the African diaspora, and intellectual history. Her research interests also include the history of medicine. She has served as an elected member of the National Council of the American Studies Association (2009-2012) and was a member of the ASA’s Executive Committee from 2010-2012. She recently completed her last year (2011-2014) on the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians. The Organization of American Historians appointed her as a Distinguished Lecturer from 2010-2013. In addition to being a 2001-2002 Schomburg Center & National Endowment for the Humanities Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (New York Public Library), Mitchell has received a range of fellowship support for her work. Mitchell has also worked as a researcher for two major documentary projects: “Behind the Veil: Documenting African-American Life in the Jim Crow South” (Duke University); and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project (Stanford University). Mitchell is now writing a book that is tentatively entitled Idle Anxieties: Youth, Race, and Sexuality during the Great Depression. Above and beyond considering myriad ways in which idleness among workers, transients, and the poor was deemed a threat to social order, Idle Anxieties will examine how concerns about youth and idleness were suffused with gendered, sexualized, raced, and classed meanings as it considers changing notions of time, productivity, and leisure during economically slack years.

Articles:"

"Turns of Kaleidoscope: 'Race, 'Ethnicity, and Analytical Patterns in American Women's and Gender History," Journal of Women's History 25:4 (Winter 2013): 46-73

Comment on "Silences Broken, Silences Kept: Gender & Sexuality in African-American History, "Gender & History 11:3 (November 1999), pp. 433-444, which was chosen as one of the "ten...most influential articles published in Gender & History over the last twenty-five years." Gender & History Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Virtual Issue (2013)

"'A Corrupting Influence': Idleness and Sexuality during the Great Depression," in Interconnections: Gender & Race in American History, ed. Carol Faulkner and Alison Parker (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012), pp. 187-228.

Excerpt of interview with Jessie Lee Chassion available on "Voices from Behind the Veil: Selections from the Center for Documentary Studies" (disc two, track three); produced by Stephen Smith of American Radio Works in collaboration with the Behind the Veil Project, Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University.

"Marcus Garvey: Look for Me in the Whirlwind" (documentary); American Experience (PBS). Produced and Directed by Stanley Nelson; Associate Producer, Gwendolyn D. Dixon; written by Marcia Smith; Executive Consultant, Robert Hill. First Airdate: February 12, 2001.